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Re: Where did the term 'tube rollling' come from?

I first came across the term "tube rolling" in the early 90s in the mfgr comments section of S'pile...the good ole days when it was a journal sized mag and high end audio was fun. There may be earlier references but I'm not aware of them.

David Manley and Roger Modjeski were going at it publicly over the relative merits of each of their amp design philosophies. One of Roger's claimed design advantages was the capability of his amps being able to accept a wide range of output tubes with minor bias and output transformer tap adjustments. David claimed that his designs were highly optimized for a certain output tube type and really no other and therefore the sound of his designs was better than that of Roger's. David derogatorily referred to the willy-nilly switching around of output tubes as tube rolling. Current usage seems to refer to all forms of tube switching at all positions in an amp and includes both switching within a given tube type and between tube types.


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